POLITICS

On Primary Day, Paul Rails Against an Old Favorite—The Fed

Ron Paul returned to a favorite criticism on Tuesday, defending his opposition to the Federal Reserve in a USA Today op-ed, as the paper's editorial board criticized his anti-Fed stance.

“Throughout its nearly 100-year history, the Federal Reserve has presided over the near-complete destruction of the United States dollar,” Paul wrote. He criticized the Fed’s reaction to the current recession, saying that the Fed has increased the national debt “by trillions” and has made it impossible to depart from near-zero interest rates without sending the national debt soaring.

“If the Fed would just stop intervening and distorting the market, thus allowing the functioning of a truly free market that deals with profit and loss, our dollar would grow stronger, we could create new jobs, and our economy could finally recover,” Paul concluded.

The USA Today editorial board disagreed.

“Paul apparently thinks that the best approach to a 21st century globalized economy is a return to banking practices of the 19th century,” the paper's editorial board wrote. The Fed’s willingness to lend saved the economy from plunging into another Great Depression, they argued.

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Paul's counterargument? "To say that auditing or ending the Federal Reserve reflects '19th century thinking' is to propose that economic responsibility and transparency in government are ideas whose time has passed," the Texas Congressman wrote in his op-ed.